In recent weeks, revolution in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv has given way to Russian intervention in the Crimean peninsula—a Ukrainian region with deep historical and national ties to Russia. Not only is Crimea home to Yalta, Feodosia and other sun-drenched resort communities that have catered to the Russian aristocracy since the time of the tsars, but the Crimean citadel of Sevastopol has also served as the base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in the imperial, Soviet and now post-Soviet eras.

If current tensions devolve into an actual “hot” war, it would not be the first Russian war in Crimea. Indeed, for many Russians, a victorious reclamation of the Black Sea peninsula—whether by means of Tuesday's treaty or by violence—would help bury the ghosts of an ill-conceived, disorganized and festering 19th-century conflict that has made Crimea, for Russians, practically synonymous with disaster.

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Not so well-known is that a principal cause of Russia’s embarrassing defeat in the (first?) Crimean War (1853-1856) was the country’s age-old vice: alcohol. From the inebriate and undisciplined peasant conscripts to their inept, corrupt and often even more soused army commanders, the lackluster military that Russia put into the field in Crimea was the unhappy product of the imperial state’s centuries-long promotion of a vodka trade that had become the tsars’ greatest source of revenue.

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Russia’s road to war was muddled and chaotic. When Tsar Nicholas I ascended the throne in December 1825 after the death of one elder brother and the abdication of a second, a drunken Petersburg mob of liberal-minded “Decembrists” dared challenge his legitimacy, demanding the replacement of Russia’s absolutism with a British-style constitutional monarchy. Without hesitation, the young tsar violently dispatched these liberal revolutionaries, but even so, the threat of European liberalism weighed heavily on Nicholas, who hardened into an ardent defender of conservative autocracy, even going so far as to send Russian troops to Hungary in 1849 to crush the liberal uprisings there. The tsar’s own geopolitical ambitions focused on the declining Ottoman Empire to the south, which he had famously dubbed “the sick man of Europe.” Armed with the pretext of defending their Orthodox brothers living in the Ottoman Empire, in 1853, Russian imperial forces pushed into the Ottoman principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia along the Danube in present-day Romania.

Fearing what an Ottoman collapse would do to the European balance of power, Britain, France, and Sardinia soon sided with the Ottoman Turks against Russia, and by mid-1854 had dealt Russia a series of embarrassing military defeats that forced Nicholas to abandon his newly claimed principalities along the lower Danube. But that was not the end of hostilities, as the allied forces turned their attention to Sevastopol in the Crimean to destroy Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which, they reasoned, left-unchecked would continue to threaten the Ottoman Empire, the Dardanelles and the Mediterranean beyond. So, in 1854, the allies landed their forces well north of the Crimean port city and marched southward to take it.

While the allies besieged the Russian positions, the Russian soldiers——“in high spirits”——besieged the vodka.

One enlisted Pole fighting for the Russians, Robert Adolf Chodasiewicz, wrote a gripping firsthand account of the Russians’ first clash with the allies at the Battle of the Alma River, the first major engagement in the Crimean War. There, the cocksure commander Prince Aleksandr Menshikov invited the ladies of Sevastopol to join him in watching Russia’s certain victory from a nearby hilltop. Meanwhile, his troops sensed impending disaster.

“Why?” asked Chodasiewicz.

8th Hussars soldiers prepare a meal in the field during the Crimean War, 1855. | Roger Fenton/Getty Images)

“As if you don’t know as well as I do!” One veteran explained: “We are to have no vodka, and how can we fight without it?” The others all agreed.

Why were the men denied their daily combat ration of bread, meat, a garnet of beer and two charkas—good-sized cupfuls—of vodka? “Our worthy Colonel thought it advisable to put the money in his own pocket, remarking that half these fellows will be killed, so it will be only a waste to give them vodka,” Chodasiewicz wrote.

Soldiers denied their charkas could still get liquor from merchants in nearby towns, from corrupt officers or, occasionally, by pure happenstance. Chodasiewicz’s regiment, for instance, was “saved” from sobriety when the canteen man, in charge of safeguarding the vodka stores, fled the field as soon as bullets started flying. While the allies besieged the Russian positions, the Russian soldiers—“in high spirits”—besieged the vodka.

Kiryakov stumbled to his feet and, bottle of champagne in hand, ordered his Minsk regiment to open fire on his own Kiev Hussars.

The officers were often just as drunk and confused as their troops: “During the five hours that the battle went on we neither saw nor heard of our general of division, or brigadier, or colonel,” Chodasiewicz wrote. “We did not during the whole time receive any orders from them either to advance or to retire; and when we retired, nobody knew whether we ought to go to the right or left.”

Not even the army high command was sober. While he was supposed to be commanding the left flank of the Russian defenses in the face of an allied attack, Lt. Gen. Vasily Kiryakov was instead presiding over a raucous champagne party. At one point, Kiryakov, described by Russian military historian Evgeny V. Tarle as “utterly ignorant, totally devoid of any military ability and rarely in a completely sober state,” stumbled to his feet and—bottle of champagne in hand—ordered his Minsk regiment to open fire on what he thought was the French cavalry. But the “French cavalry” was actually his own Kiev Hussars, who were decimated by the barrage. Justifiably enraged, the Hussar commander had to be physically restrained from running Kiryakov through with his sword.